Thats the ipad (lets face it, iOS is a FAR more popular term than meer camera ISO). I dont mind though, the spell correct is pretty usefull after a few too many Guiness.

Oh, and, not that it matters much or many ppl care,. Nikon is woefull for serious timelapse, they cant handle bulb ramping or lens twist, that pretty much wipes them out for that. Canon is the king there.

The 1D to 1Ds gap is generally 6-9 months, so I doubt we'd see anything until the end of the year at least. I'm happy enough to wait. My 1Ds3 is still going very strong after 4 years and my new 1D4 is still an amazing piece of machinery.

When it is really 2 stops better than the 5d2 it is at least three stops better than the 40d, so I can take deep sky pics @ 6400 or even 12500 which I now do @ 1600.
That means that using the EF 85mm 1.8 I can expose 4 seconds without tracking and still stars till mag 12 on the photo !

"Oh, and, not that it matters much or many ppl care,. Nikon is woefull for serious timelapse, they cant handle bulb ramping or lens twist, that pretty much wipes them out for that. Canon is the king there.[/QUOTE]"

I didn't understand this. What is bulb ramping and lens twist? Never heard of that before?

I just looked up bulb ramping so its being able to change settings midstream in a time lapse. Yes that could be handy.

The only reference for lens twisting is to lenses unscrewing. Is that what you mean?

Alex won the Canary Island International astro competition with a time lapse with a Nikon D700 with a Nikon 14-24mm lens. Also the Malin awards the year before last. He gets regular APODs with it.

Last I checked the earlier Nikon models have the superior high ISO low light performance for a long time and its something Canon obviously have worked towards improving with the 5D3 whilst Nikon has chased Canon's resolution advantage. Its funny really.

I checked the specs for the Nikon D800 and time lapse and video and it appears (its not totally clear) that you have full manual control over aperture and exposure.

"full manual control of shutter speed/aperture/ISO, smooth aperture changes (when using HDMI out), built-in time lapse movie making, and index marking. The D800 allows FX or DX crop video, but not the 2.7x crop that the D4 does. You can capture 1920x1080 stills while shooting video. "

The time lapse function is part of the video mode of the camera. I wonder though if this is the same thing or if the outputs would be acceptable as some shoot time lapse night shots in RAW. So if the time lapse of the Nikon is part of the video mode then Nikon RAW file output may not be available. But it doesn't need an intervalvometer which is a plus. As no cameras are out in the public yet these sorts of details are not 100% clear.

I don't mean any sort of movie mode, just manual bulb mode for full control.And always in RAW, that a given for best results.

You can take time lapse with any camera, is just harder with some, and with serious post processing anything is possible.

Ye, the lens twist locks aperture down to stop flickering. Nikons can't do this although it appears some sort of lens adaptor may make it possible. The little bumper is one of very few ways of doing TL with ap/Iso control, and it's spec says it won't work with Nikon because of the way it handles bulb mode. I think that means flash feedback can't be used to stop flickering at short exposures, or it can't be exposure ramped reliably in small time steps.

All these limitations just mean more post processing to eliminate flicker. As you say, Alex has produced award winning TL so it's obviously possible, just harder.

There's good reasons for most timelapsers to use Canon, particularly the 5Dmk2.

This camera looks awesome. I'd love to have one. Enormous potential for night/astro photography. Doing the cost analysis I don't think I'll be able to justify it though, need to be able to pay for it some how ... we'll see.

Thanks for the explanation Fred. But a good post as it opened up new techniques I was not aware of.

I did see a thread on the net where a guy developed a similar thing for Nikons. I don't think it is available as a buyable item just yet.

Can you adjust these things with software on the fly or once a sequence has started that's it?

I guess D800 files would be large too for several hours of time lapse at full frame at 100mb each.

D800 site says you can control aperture and exposure manually in video but we are talking about RAW exposures. Is RAW that important after all you shrink it down to HD at the end?

It may be a good time to buy a 5D mark ii or perhaps I'll simply buy both as both cameras are sufficiently different to be useful for different purposes (I put my name down for notification for a 5d Mk iii already).

Also wouldn't an astro camera be better than either for that matter. My Proline 16803 with a Pentax 6 x 7 55mm F4 lens is very very wide probably the equivalent of 28mm 35mm lens. There is a Pentax 6 x 7 45mm lens as well. Bin it 2x2. It might be worth an experiment
and you could pan slowly with the mount. The PMX has a great joystick that you can turn down the rate of slew to really really slow so that could be handy. Or do you slew between exposures so you don't get streaky shots? That could be tricky.

Greg.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bassnut

Greg. That comment was a bit tongue in cheek

I don't mean any sort of movie mode, just manual bulb mode for full control.And always in RAW, that a given for best results.

You can take time lapse with any camera, is just harder with some, and with serious post processing anything is possible.

Ye, the lens twist locks aperture down to stop flickering. Nikons can't do this although it appears some sort of lens adaptor may make it possible. The little bumper is one of very few ways of doing TL with ap/Iso control, and it's spec says it won't work with Nikon because of the way it handles bulb mode. I think that means flash feedback can't be used to stop flickering at short exposures, or it can't be exposure ramped reliably in small time steps.

All these limitations just mean more post processing to eliminate flicker. As you say, Alex has produced award winning TL so it's obviously possible, just harder.

There's good reasons for most timelapsers to use Canon, particularly the 5Dmk2.

i'm going to be a little controversial and say that i think the hype about improved high ISO performance with each new DSLR released (whether Canon/Nikon) is a little misplaced.

most of the gains are in noise smoothing algorithms applied to the JPGs only and which can be applied to files from any camera in post-processing anyway. there may be incremental (very small) gains in reduction of read noise and with the 5DIII a claimed increase in photoelectric conversion rate (which I'm betting is small) but i really don't think it is at all possible to increase the physical noise performance by two stops.

i tested a 10MP 5D original against my 21MP 5DII and aside from a few more hot pixels which are easily handled (and not really *noise* in the true sense of the word), the noise performance of the original looks better to me.. not all that surprising given the much larger pixel size and therefore lower shot noise (gapless microlenses on the 5DII making the difference much smaller than the pure arithmetic of the pixel count would suggest). but the gapless microlens card has already been played now so little to gain on that front.

i expect the 5DIII will be *very* similar in RAW performance to the 5DII, as pixel size is almost identical. the noise i see in my images is not originating in the camera.. it is purely a statistical function of sampling low light levels with a given pixel size.

am i missing something.. do people really think there is scope to improve the noise performance significantly.. what source of noise is being reduced or how is the signal collection improved??